ИСТИНА

The current study is aimed at identifying eye-movement patterns in readers of different native language backgrounds. Following K.Rayner (1998), we analyze whether the visual semantic search strategies are influenced by the reading skills, acquired earlier. The hypothesis was that the task scanning patterns are guided by the previous experience of reading in different writing systems. The participants (19 Japanese, 20 Chinese and 45 Russian students) had to look for meaningful English words in letter matrices (15*15). The task required the item-by-item analysis, letter string construction and lexical decision. The number of the found words and eye movements were recorded (with SMI RED 250 system). The results show that Japanese- and Chinese – speaking participants experience more difficulty in reconstructing words from nonordered set of separate letters. The combination of ntersaccadic angle and saccade direction measures (Blinnikova & Izmalkova, 2017) were used to ifferentiate between sequential and non-sequential patterns, applied by the subjects. Russian-speaking participants tended to use “horizontal sequential” pattern, which is characterized by horizontal saccades from left to right with little change of direction, whereas Chinese- and Japanese-speaking participants made more vertically-oriented saccades (although saccades with horizontal direction still dominated). F(2;805)=30.4; p<0.05 for intersaccadic angles 0°-45°, F(2;805)=10.4; p<0.05 for right-upward direction and F(2;805)=10.2; p<0.05 for upward-left direction. Japanese-speaking participants also showed significantly more backwards-directed saccades (135°-180°) than Russian and Chinese subjects (F(2;805)=22.7; p<0.05). This difference in visual search can be attributed to the previously formed strategies of verbal material processing. The research is supported by RFBR project 18-013-01240.